October 1989: Proclamation of the Republic of Hungary

This photograph was taken on 23 October 1989 in Kossuth Lajos Square in Budapest. It shows the US Ambassador to Hungary, Mark Palmer, in a red bow tie, among the crowds as the acting head of state, Mátyás Szűrös, solemnly proclaimed the birth of a new republic.

Szűrös's announcement brought to an end four decades of Communism with its assertion that the republic was to be a place grounded in the values of ‘bourgeoise democracy and democratic socialism’. ‘This’, he added, ‘is a prelude to a new historical era.’

These were welcome words for Ambassador Palmer as he watched on. By 1989 Hungary had become the most liberal of all the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But that year, as the old Communist Bloc crumbled, change was coming to the region at pace.

Everyone had noticed this. Soviet troops were being withdrawn; the barbed wire on the Austro-Hungarian border was torn down. The only things that remained familiar in East Europe, wrote one journalist, were the acrid 'stink of two-stroke exhaust and low-grade coal'.

That summer, during a visit to the country, President Bush had declared that, 'The Iron Curtain has begun to part'. In October, shortly before the above photograph was taken, Rezső Nyers, the last leader of the old regime, had left office. By the time he did, Hungary's 1949 Stalinist constitution was being overhauled.

The journalist Peter Hitchens, who was in Hungary covering developments for the Express at the time of the proclamation, reported that, ‘Hadly anybody except masochists will admit to being a Communist now in Budapest. They all call themselves Socialists.’ •